The National Highway System: America's Original Housing Sin

I recently read The housing theory of everything from Works in Progress. It's an interesting read about how expensive housing (and the policies that cause it) have much larger downstream ramifications than would first appear. I like to be able to walk to things, so it was preaching to the choir for me, but it provides some interesting food for thought even if you're less density inclined. I recently drove down from Seattle to San Francisco, and that gave me quite a bit of time to reflect on the highway system and how it plays into all of this.

Here's what I ended up with, in short:

• Systems that leverage selfish best-interest are the easiest to maintain
• Wealthy/powerful people enjoy using their wealth to make their life better.
  • (Lots of people might enjoy these things, and even non-wealthy people might enjoy some of them, but the poorer you are the more you need to pick and choose).
• Much of the life improvements require people to be in close proximity to your house:
  • Gardeners to take care of the yard
  • Contractors to make changes to the house or do maintenance
  • Cleaners to tidy up
  • Restaurant workers to provide food
  • Grocery workers
  • City workers to maintain utilities
  • ... obviously we can go on, but you get the idea ...
• These workers can't afford to live in the rich neighborhood, mostly by design
• These workers need to be able to get from their lodging to their place of work
• There are multiple ways this can be accomplished
  • Increased density
  • Public Transit (Bus/Streetcar/Train/Subway)
  • Car
• Highways uniquely enable workers to commute to wealthy neighborhoods, in a way that disincentives additional density.

The basic idea is that if we didn't have highways near our cities, wealthy people would be incentivized to encourage density & public transportation in their own selfish interest. You want these nice services that people enable, but you maybe don't like density initially. That's fine, and you initially push against adding additional housing or public transit near you etc. But you eventually start to a breaking point as more people are added to the system: either you lose access to services, or you have to pay through the nose for them. You have an incentive to compromise, maybe allowing more density near you, or pushing for better transit. (And then better transit enables more density).

Highways break this self-interest argument. When we remodeled our house a few years back, our contractor lived over 30 miles away. This may not sound like much, but keep in mind most of that distance is through a "dense" urban environment, not rural farmland. With access to highways through the city, our contractor could get to our house in about 45 minutes: not a short commute, but short enough to make the project worthwhile. Now let's imagine I didn't support upzoning or transit. Thanks to the combination of highways and ample parking ensured that I don't lose anything by my position! If I don't like density, I can fulfill my selfish interests without compromising!

Now let's magically remove the highways from our system. It now takes over him 90 minutes each way to commute to our house. Quite possibly, he would have refused to take work in Seattle at all! We would have been forced to remodel ourselves, hire a much more expensive local contractor, or skip the project. Now I have some reason to change my position: not because I care about people, or density, or transit, but because it makes my life better.

I'm of course not suggesting that the only reason people would support density is self-interest, but it's so much easier to convince me of something if it makes my life better. Many people in single-family neighborhoods have real anxiety about parking or traffic or crime if density increases. Many of these fears are unfounded, but telling someone "that's not true" isn't very effective! The fear of change is still there! If instead the tradeoff is that my groceries are half the price, or I can finally get my roof fixed - that's a real benefit I can feel.

This all said: highways are obviously here with us and not going away. If I could wave a magic wand to change things I would toll highways generously, especially as they go through cities. (And then just give it right back as a tax credit to people to avoid the inevitable complaints about a tax on the poor). This would perhaps change the incentive equation enough to align our self-interest with the public-interest.